Absoblogginlutely!

Pipex Support Shine…..

By Andy on Thursday, September 11, 2003

Pipex support sent me a reply to an email I sent them 19 days ago. In it they wrote “Dear Customer:
Thank you for your email. Please accept our apologies for the delay in replying. Are you still having the same problem or has it been resolved? Please advise either by replying to this email or by
calling us on the number below.”

I wonder if it will take them another 19 days to read the follow up email I sent to say it was fixed on the same day and another 19 to reply to the snotty email I just posted saying this is a really poor level of response (and its not the first time either).

Blogger

Free Blogger

By Andy on Thursday, September 11, 2003

Loads of people have blogged about blogger going free, but if you read the announcement , the feature that a lot of people are raving about, RSS, is not listed as one of the features now available in the free version after all they need some features to get some income! Being rather cynical I wonder if this is an attempt to stop the flow of people moving from blogger to MovableType (or other blogging tools) as opposed to the “hey we have enough money now we are owned by Google and we’re also good guys too” spin.

Webcams

Logitech Webcam

By Andy on Thursday, September 11, 2003

Installed a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 webcam which is pretty nifty. The size of a large golf ball it sits in a stand and records sound and video. The neat option is the “face tracking” capability. Turning this on, the camera will zoom, pan (to a limited degree) and focus on a persons face as they move around the field of vision of the camera. Great for tracking whats going on in a room. The only weird thing is they don’t have any motion capture triggers to record only when there is movement. Hopefully conquercam will run at the same time as the facial tracking software and enable me to do this.

Windows 2000

Whats the time Mr Wolf?

By Andy on Thursday, September 11, 2003

With the combination of net time /setsntp:”ntp.demon.co.uk ntp1.demon.co.uk ntp2.demon.co.uk” and w32tm -period 0 -once -v my home pc should now be telling me the correct time which means there won’t be a time warp of 10 minutes from leaving the pc in the morning to getting in the car!

Security

Another critical fix from Microsoft

By Andy on Thursday, September 11, 2003

Yet another Critical fix is available from Microsoft TechNet. I was tipped off to the existence of this one yesterday when attending the SANS security webcase which by the way was excellent. They showed you the tools to check/hack a web application complete with a walkthrough of how they had pentested a bank site and with no clever tricks managed to view users credit card numbers, bank information, log on AS the user and change the users passwords…..quite scary stuff! Needless to say the bank was anonymous!

Security

Streaming music for Webconferences

By Andy on Wednesday, September 10, 2003

I’m currently waiting for the SANS Web conference, “Is Your Web App Secure? How Do You Know?” , and they are playing “hold music” until it starts…and at a low quality stream it sounds awful. On a brighter note, the conference is advertised as featuring Ed Skoudis (whoever he is) with a “Exploiting Web Applications-Live Demo” featuring Caleb Sima so it should be interesting. Hope I don’t get a heartattack at all the weaknesses in my/our webpages!

Search Engines

Advanced Feedster searching

By Andy on Wednesday, September 10, 2003

I tried to setup Feedster to search for references to my blog, but not return my postings. That way I can find out who is quoting/referencing/gossiping about me. I was having trouble getting the tools option to work so I asked Pieter in the ggsearch forums and he pointed me to Feedster Search: ggsearch NOT weblog_title=GGSearch which works. However, if I swap GGSearch for Absoblogginlutely I appear in position 1 Update which is not what I wanted/need. It should have displayed without my results! So sorry Scott – maybe you shouldn’t blog this 🙂 Still yet again, this is the power of blogging getting first rate support with developers keeping an eye on blog feeds 🙂

Apache

.htaccess file wizard

By Andy on Wednesday, September 10, 2003

scriptygoddess linked to an article from Jennifer who linked to a online htaccess editor, which enables you to easily password protect, create custom 404 pages etc. However, Chris has discovered that this wizard is allegedly a copy of Eyecreate’s wizard who have posted their conversation with the “author” of the php2b wizard. Like they say, for someone who cant write english very well, it does make you wonder how they wrote the code! It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Spyware

Adaware vs Search&Destroy

By Andy on Friday, September 5, 2003

Had a major problem with a spyware infection yesterday. User told me that their pc was incredibly slow and Search&Destroy would not fire up. S&D was actually running minimised but it was not possible to restore or maximise it. Turns out that the pc was actually running slowly due to the machine trying to constantly access a faulty cd! I ran hijack this as the user had a toolbar named “lslyfqudprl” and homepage was set to mysearchnow. That found the toolbar and an autorun app called dseeglpr.exe -quiet in the registry (which I had already spotted by hand to start with!). I cleaned this and then ran adaware and it found IGetNet and Lop.com. These were cleaned and then the system ran with Search&Destroy which found another 5 objects, although these were pictures from lop. A slow scan of the computer with AntiVirus software (why oh why do these not detect lop.com components as virus’s or malicious software?) and the user eventually got his pc back a couple of hours later.

Blogger

Blogger Publishing

By Andy on Thursday, September 4, 2003

PcJunky had problems publishing with blogger with an error message that said “Current Status: There Were Errors in Publishing.002 There are no current posts to publish. You might be trying to publish a post set to a date later than right now.”
What it should have said is “your template has been deleted – i’m afraid you’ll have to add it again – hope you have a backup!”